Burning hatred must be faced down by our police and politicians

‘KAT’ — Kill All Taigs — read the sign on the children’s bonfire in Rathcoole in Newtownabbey.

Let that sink in. A genocidal message on an event organised for youngsters.

We shouldn’t be shy about spelling out what ‘KAT’ means. It means that there weren’t enough Loughinislands, Greysteels, or Sean Graham’s bookies.

It means that every Catholic man, woman and child should be slaughtered.

Just because this vile slogan has been about for years doesn’t make it any more acceptable.

There would rightly be uproar in Britain if crowds gathered around blazing pyres which included messages of ‘Kill All Jews’ or ‘Kill All Muslims’.

This ‘KAT’ sign wasn’t placed on a bonfire in Northern Ireland at the height of the conflict.

It was put there on Saturday — a quarter of a century after the paramilitary ceasefires, and over two decades on from the Good Friday Agreement.

That nobody sought to remove it is an awful indictment of the community and political leadership in some places here.

Of course, the overwhelming majority of unionists are appalled by ‘KAT’.

DUP and Ulster Unionist voices have been raised against the slogan on the bonfire in recent days.

Those voices are genuine, but they’re not enough. There must be active intervention on the ground by both local politicians and the PSNI.

For far too long collective blind eyes were turned.

Vocal opposition now needs to move on to action on the ground. If we don’t do that we’re allowing hate crimes to occur without challenge. We’re also raising a generation to believe that culture isn’t about literature, music or language. It’s about sectarian hatred and bigotry.

It’s about gathering around a burning prye that celebrates a call for half the population to be wiped out.

Let us not pretend that sick sectarian displays are solely the preserve of one section of our community.

Bonfires, which had fortunately almost disappeared in nationalist areas, have made a resurgence in some places in recent years.

In August 2018 one in the Bogside mocked murdered prison and police officers.

Mindless morons thought it fit to gloat about the deaths of David Black, Adrian Ismay, Stephen Carroll and Ronan Kerr.

A bonfire in Newry last year was bedecked with offensive messages including ‘KAH’ (Kill All Huns).

Other signs celebrated the death of 18 soldiers in Narrow Water — “18 Brits blown to bits”. One mocked the late IRA victims’ campaigner Willie Frazer — ‘Join your da in hell, Willie’.

Let us hope that there are no such repetitions in any nationalist bonfires which may be held next month.

The way forward is not for one community to ape the other in depraved and disgusting behaviour.

When I condemned the Rathcoole bonfire, a loyalist tweeted me a photo of the Newry one. “What about this?” he asked.

I told him it was sick to ‘joke’ about the death of other human beings, and asked if he felt the same way about the KAT sign.

The brutal honesty of his reply shocked me. “Not really,” he said. “At the end of the day, it was the RC community that were the aggressors. You reap what you sow.”

We should not pretend that these vile sectarian slogans appear from nowhere, or that they have zero support. Very sadly, that’s not the case.